


as i was walkin'

by oh_fudgecakes



Series: the ghosts of wayne manor [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Gen, Humor, Light Angst, Spread it around, alfred is an actual naggy housewife, also, bruce is an overprotective dad, but he loves this little boy so much, dick finds thomas wayne's journal entries about bruce and it makes him cry, dick is a tiny nerd, dick is an ugly crier, dick sings badly, shameless amounts of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 14:20:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5970124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oh_fudgecakes/pseuds/oh_fudgecakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Crr-reak, crr-reak, went the floorboards under each buoyant leap. Crr-reak, crr-reak. It was almost like a song! He quickly changed the rhythm of his steps, jumping and leaping, adding a little can-can like kick at the end of every other step, just ‘cause he could.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Cra-creak, cra-creak. Cra-creak, cra-creak.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“One early mornin’!” he shot for the correct key, missed by a mile— but who cared about pitch anyways— not him! “As I was walkin’!”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Cra-creak. Cra—</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Crunch.</i>
</p>
<p>Bored and chased out of the kitchen by an irate Alfred, a young Dick Grayson falls through a loose floorboard while exploring the attic and ends up in an locked storeroom housing an interesting set of journals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as i was walkin'

**Author's Note:**

> Dick is around 9 years old in this. He's been with Bruce for maybe a year, and is already Robin. This is part of a series of one-shots that can each be read on its own.

_One early mornin’, as I was walkin’…_

“Master Dick,” Alfred said, exasperated and yet immeasurably fond.

_…I met a woman, we started talkin’._

_“Master Dick,”_ Alfred said, a little more forcefully, “I am _trying_ to make your lunch.”

Dick only flipped the collar of his jacket up, continuing to sashay slowly back along the kitchen counter as he mouthed along with the showy piano. He swung an imaginary cane in one hand, pushing down the brim of an imaginary fedora with the other. Alfred took a step away, shooting him a disapproving look as he began to skootch backwards into his space in time with the sassy rhythm from the radio.

_One mint julep…_

“Master Dick—“

_“Was the cause of it all!”_ Dick sang loudly, significantly off-key.

Alfred smacked him over the bottom with the flat of his trusty wooden spoon. Dick yelped and hopped away, covering his bottom with both hands. The spoon rapped him sharply over the head, and he scurried quickly to the other side of the table, shooting Alfred a look of utter betrayal. Alfred simply gave him a final disapproving look and began to mix some kind of batter in a large ceramic bowl.

“Don’t you have someone better to bother today?” he asked, “Where is Master Bruce?”

“Still at Wayne Enterprises,” Dick said glumly, and slumped down over the table. His elbow knocked a bottle of dressing over. The creamy sauce went all over the table. “Oops.”

“Master Dick!” Alfred exclaimed, and there was suddenly an pincer-like grip on his ear.

“Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow,“ Dick whimpered, leaning across the table in a vain attempt to ease the pull on his reddening ear. It only brought him back in range of Alfred’s evil wooden spoon, which he used the handle of to rap him over the head once more. “OW!”

Alfred let go, and prodded him with the spoon as he was reaching up to nurse his throbbing ear.

“Hey, hey, _ow!_ That isn’t _nice,_ Alfie.”

The butler came around the table and Dick jumped up, scrambling to the other side of the table.

“I am _cooking_ your _lunch,_ Master Dick,” Alfred said pointedly, following him around the table, “And if you do not leave me to it, you’ll not have it on time, and if you don’t have it on time, I’m fairly certain you’ll be coming to me in no time at all, complaining that you’re _hungry.”_

“Quit _chasing me around the table!”_ Dick cried, trotting away from the irate man.

Alfred abruptly changed directions, catching Dick off-guard, and jabbed him in the back as he was turning.

“ _OW!”_ Dick yipped, and covered his bottom just in case, “Okay, I’m going, I’m _going!”_

He ran from the room, chased by the jabs of the wooden spoon, and shot the old man one last betrayed look from behind a large Victorian vase. Alfred stood at the door, looking entirely unsympathetic. He held the spoon up threateningly. Dick took the servants’ staircase two at a time. He may have been Robin, server of justice and the nightmare of villainous scourge all across Gotham City, but he knew when he was beat. Jesus, the man was _relentless._

Coming up on the next floor, he found himself in a part of the manor he hadn’t seen before. Plain wooden doors stretched down the hallway, and at the end of it was a discreet doorway that seemed to lead to the main part of the manor. He ducked behind the wide leaves of a potted fern as a door creaked slowly open. Bruce wasn’t home and Alfred was in the kitchen, meaning that it was one of the servants. They were always weird around him, formal and polite and just… _yeeeesh._ He wasn’t sure how much he liked being a so-called ‘rich kid’ yet. Everyone except Bruce and Alfred were just all around _weird._

A chamber maid came down the hall, black mary-janes clicking against the wooden floor as she tied an apron around her waist, adjusted her headband. She had a sweater draped over her arm, which she pulled on as she disappeared down the stairs leading back down to the kitchen. The servants probably lived in this part of the manor, Dick realised. The kitchens, the cleaning and gardening supplies, the laundry room— everything was located conveniently below.

He emerged slowly from the ferns, looking up and down the hallway in case there were other people coming. There were none. He continued up another flight of stairs, curious to see what was above. It was another hallway just like the one he’d just came from. He went up one more floor, and found a long hallway. The decor, the ornate suits of armour, and the paintings on the wall made it clear that this was linked directly to the main part of the manor. There was a single door, which he tried. It was locked. A small flight of narrow steps spiralled up into darkness beside the servants’ staircase. It _crunched_ under his first carelessly buoyant step, and he took the rest of it carefully, mindful of the laborious creak of each stair under his weight. Did the servants come up here? It didn’t seem very safe.

Crammed right under the sloping roof of the manor, he found a bare room stacked to the brim with boxes and furniture draped in white sheets.

“Holy plot device, Batman!” he exclaimed to himself, “This must be an _attic._ Just like in horror movies!”

Obviously, circus caravans didn’t have attics. He hadn’t known they were actually a _thing_. He’d always thought attics may have been some outdated norm that only appeared in movies now, mostly for creepy purposes and the scare factor. But now it looked like attics were a _real_ thing in _real_ houses. There was even a dusty brass chandelier in the corner, and it was even the really old sort with the candles. _Actual_ candles, not the fake ones with the electric bulbs. There was wax trailing down their sides, and one had broken cleanly in half. The crystals lay haphazardly over the floor, the body of it tilted to one side like some sort of beached shipwreck.

He skipped towards it because napping in chandeliers was _totally_ his thing, and he kinda wanted to see what a _real_ vintage chandelier was like up close. Crr- _reak,_ crr- _reak,_ went the floorboards under each buoyant leap. Crr-r _eak,_ crr- _reak._ It was almost like a song! He quickly changed the rhythm of his steps, jumping and leaping, adding a little can-can like kick at the end of every other step, just ‘cause he could.

Cra- _creak_ , cra-creak. Cra- _creak_ , cra-creak.

_“One early mornin’!”_ he shot for the correct key, missed by a mile— but who cared about pitch anyways— not him! “ _As I was walkin’!”_

Cra- _creak._ Cra—

_Crunch._

A loose floorboard gave under one badly placed step. His whole leg went through, and he barely caught himself from sprawling face-first on the ground. The floor gave an ominous creak as he landed heavily on his palms.

“That…” he said to the room at large, “Does not sound good.”

He turned carefully, and examined the spot where his leg disappeared into the floor. The floorboards around it were loose. If he pushed the one underneath his knee ever-so-slightly down… he could probably pull his leg— He stiffened as the ominous creak returned, louder than before, and this time it did not stop when he snatched his hand away. That… had _possibly_ been an ill-thought through idea.

The floorboard under him gave with another loud _crash,_ and then he was falling down into darkness. It was a short fall, and he landed with a muffled _whumpf!_ before he could really begin to properly panic. Dust instantly erupted in a thick cloud around him, and he felt some go into his mouth.

_“YEearghh!”_

He pulled the neck of his shirt up, and wiped his tongue on the inside of it. _Gross!_ He looked up from the inside of his shirt and immediately sneezed twice in quick succession. A little bit of snot came out with that last sneeze, so he wiped his nose on the inside of his shirt as well. As he looked up again, he felt another sneeze coming and pinched his nose shut. No more snot! The sneeze died, unsneezed. He pulled the collar of his jacket up around his face. It was soft and smelled like detergent and sun. Bruce had bought it for him awhile ago, black with yellow stripes going down the arms, and he _loved it._ He took a hold of the zip at the bottom and pulled it all the way to the top so that the collar was zipped up over his face.

He gingerly got to his feet. He had landed on a black garbage bag that had split open when he had landed on it. Duvets and old quilts spilt out over the dusty floor. Lucky him.

The room was dark save for the light coming through from a single window. Dust motes drifted lazily in the sunlight. There was no white-draped furniture in this room. Instead, it will filled with boxes and boxes of… stuff. Just completely random stuff. Papers, jewellery, books, some science toys on a chest of drawers including one of those fun pendulum things, and _ooh!—_ pin-art board! He left an imprint of his palm on it, just for fun, and carried on. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. It was clear that not even the servants came in here. He remembered the single locked door on the floor below the attic and realised that this had to be it. But why on earth was the door locked? And why was it that even the servants didn’t touch this room?

He froze as he spotted a stethoscope trailing out of an open chest.

That was—

_That was Thomas Wayne’s stethoscope._ He was pretty gosh-darned sure of it.

“Holy heartache, Batman,” he whispered, “Is this where you keep all your parents’ stuff?”

He crept slowly forward, and knelt in front of the chest. There were a series of leather-bound notebooks within it, along with a bunch of other things. A violin case rested against the side of it. He unzipped his jacket slightly and sat down, opening the first book on the stack. The cursive scrawl confirmed his guess. _Thomas Wayne,_ it read on the bottom corner of the cover. At the top of the first page was a date, and _woah_ , the man had written this _wayyy_ before Dick had even been _born._

_Went to the symphony with Martha today. Alfred was ill and we were loath to leave him alone despite his reassurances, but we had promised Marla and Roger that we would be there tonight and—_

These were Thomas Wayne’s _journals._

He flipped slowly through it, skimming the cursive handwriting.

_Saw the Kanes today, they were awful as usual; Went to the hospital over the past few days, fell down the stairs while reading; Alfred left for England yesterday night, and I burnt breakfast_ _—_ _Martha is upset with me; Leslie finally opened her clinic down in Crime Alley. It’s a good thing she’s doing and I support her whole-heartedly. Martha’s been talking about starting a charitable fund for people who can’t afford healthcare in Gotham._

All of it trivial day-to-day things, until about halfway through the book.

_Martha is pregnant._

His eyes widened. He began to flip more frantically. Almost all of the rest of the journal was filled with the details of Martha Wayne’s pregnancy. _Martha is having morning sickness, Martha has begun showing, Martha is in her second trimester._

And finally, in the last few pages of the notebook— _It’s a boy. I’ve seen the ultrasound and God Almighty, I’ve felt him kick. He is real, he is alive and he has a name. I thought Anthony was good but Martha was set on Bruce, so we made a compromise. Our son’s name is Bruce Anthony Wayne, and he is going to change the world._

He sat back slowly on his heels, a little overwhelmed. Finally, he set the journal aside, and dug through the others until he found the one that came right after it. It was… It was _all_ about Bruce. No more rambling about groceries, no more symphonies, no more complaints about the Kanes. Every single page was _Bruce did this today, Bruce did that today, Bruce rolled over today, Bruce made his first vowel today, Bruce sat up today, Bruce, Bruce, Bruce._ He still wrote about his wife, but there was always a mention of his son somewhere on the page. God, Bruce’s dad had loved him _so much._

He found himself reading through it all, slowly deciphering the scrawl as it slid into intelligible scribbles here and there. Thomas Wayne had been a doctor, and it seemed that even doctors more than twenty years ago had horrible handwriting. It was hard to reconcile the Bruce in these journals with the Bruce that he knew, so innocent, so carefree. He found himself glued to the page, dread building, as he continued to read. Bruce as a baby, Bruce as a toddler, Bruce as a young precocious child of five, six, seven… He knew how it would all end.

Finally, in the last third of the journal where the entries cut off abruptly: _Bruce asked to see the Mark of Zorro today._

God. _God._

He found himself reading on despite the mounting horror.

_Bruce asked to see the Mark of Zorro today. He’s been crazy about Zorro since we watched one of the movies together— though I can’t remember which one, for the life of me. He saw the ad in the papers before it was even released in the theatres, and ran around the whole day with his blanket tied around his neck. He says that he’s defending the poor and the vulnerable from the wicked. Alfred is having kittens trying to contain him, but there’s no containing an excitable young boy like Bruce._

_He’s—_ here, a slight blotch at the end of the ’s’, like he had paused for awhile with the pen still on the paper— _He’s got so much heart. He’s got so much love. He’s got such a deep kindness, such a deep sense of justice. Already, he involves himself in Martha’s charities, asking her about this and that, suggesting she could try doing this and that. Martha says he constantly surprises her with how good some of those suggestions are. He’s a lot smarter than the teachers give him credit for, even despite all their enthusiastic praise, a lot smarter than even Martha and I have given him credit for. I’ve come to realise that._

Another blot at the end of the ’t’.

_Right before he was born, I used to rant to Martha all day about how he was going to change the world. Call it the delusions of a first-time father. Now, I won’t say that I’ve changed my mind per se, but I have decided that he doesn’t need to change the world to be as perfect as he is, my beautiful boy. Still, this brings to mind that time, because a soul so passionate, so driven, and so talented, with the resources that our family will give him, will not leave the world untouched—_ and then, the largest blot of all at the start of the next paragraph.

_This boy,_ it read, _is truly going to change the world._

It was odd, Dick thought, that the words were getting blurrier as he continued down the page.

_He’s going to change the world in ways I still cannot begin to predict. And yet, I cannot help but wonder if it would be best if he were to live a normal life, to leave no mark on the world, and to have the world leave no mark on him. Nature works in mysterious ways, ways that sometimes seem unfair. Life is never easy for world-changers. That’s not the sort of life I want for my son. If I were to imagine a life for him, I would imagine him twenty years from now, running about as Martha and I watch from the parlour, chasing his four young boys around the yard with a pretty young wife sitting in the shade alongside an older Alfred. A life in which he will never be alone, a life meaningless, but also full of as much meaning as I have found in my Bruce—_

The words blurred beyond recognition, and Dick was confused up till he felt the tears rolling down his face. He quickly closed the book and turned away so that his tears would not fall on those precious pages. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and then put the journal back with the others. He knew without a doubt that Bruce had never read them. The grief had probably been too strong. It still seemed too strong sometimes. And now he was unbearably sad because— because—

Because the life Bruce was living now was _far_ from what his father had hoped for. He had changed Gotham, and was now changing the world in many little ways. There were new heroes now, some inspired by him and some not, but all of them coming together. There were new technologies that he worked on every hour of the day when he wasn’t sleeping, life-saving technologies, and life-saving technologies of a different kind that he worked on every hour of the night when they weren’t out patrolling. There were new charities, helping people all over Gotham and some people outside of it, all funded by the Wayne fortune.

But Bruce was alone. He was always alone, and he was always sad. And most of all, Thomas Wayne was right, because nature worked in mysterious ways, and none of it was _fair._

_None of it was fair._

He put the stethoscope in the chest and closed it before he felt the tears overtake him. He curled up, hid his face in his arms, and tried to muffle his sobs. But he had always been a particularly loud and a particularly ugly crier, as his mom had always delighted in telling him, and the sobs quickly turned into all-out _wails._

He didn’t know how long he sat there crying, but suddenly the doorknob was rattling and he could hear Alfred’s voice on the other side of the door.

“Master Dick?” he called, sounding panicked, “Are you in there?”

“Ye-e-e-es,” he sobbed, “I’m in the sto-o-reroom.”

“How on earth did you get in there! The door is locked, did you lock yourself in?”

“N-o-o-o,” he cried, “I f-fell through the floor of the a-a-ttic.”

_“What!?”_

He hiccuped, wiping his face on his knees, but the tears kept on coming.

“Are you hurt anywhere, Master Dick? Anywhere at all?” Alfred sounded almost hysterical.

“N-o-o— but I… I—“

The thought of the journals made him break out into sobs again. The doorknob rattled once more.

“You stay right there, Master Dick, I’m going to be right back and we’re going to get you out of there.” Footsteps, going back down the hall in a run, and then muffled yelling. “Bruce, _Bruce!_ Master Dick has fallen through the attic floor into the storeroom, and now he’s locked in!”

Loud thundering steps came up the stairs and across the hall.

“Dick?” It was Bruce. “Dickie, are you in there?”

“Br-u-u-u-ce,” Dick sobbed.

“What happened, Dickie? Why are you crying?”

He thought of the journals again.

_“Br-u-u-u-u-u-uceeee!”_ he wailed at the top of his lungs, _“Br-u-u-u-ceee!”_

There was a sudden crunch from the door, followed by another, and another. The door was shuddering on its hinges from some impact on the other side of it. Was Bruce… _breaking the door down with his bare hands?_

A particularly loud crunch, and Bruce’s fist came right through the door. The answer was apparently yes. The rest of the door followed soon after, and then Bruce was stepping through the ruined door and running up to him. He buried his face in Bruce’s shoulder as the man lifted him up into his arms. He was still in his suit, smelling distinctively of cologne and the air freshener the cleaners used at Wayne Tower. Dick’s sobs quietened, soothed by the familiar smell of _Bruce._ He wrapped his arms tightly around Bruce’s neck as he was carried out of the door.

Alfred came running.

“Master Dick,” he sounded worried, “Are you quite okay?”

Dick nodded against Bruce’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” he mumbled into Bruce’s chest, “I just found Bruce’s dad’s journals, which made me sad, ‘cause Bruce’s dad didn’t want him to be alone, but now he’s all alone, and I’m just really, really sad because Bruce is great and he shouldn’t be alone and it isn’t _fair_.”

There was silence for so long that Dick reluctantly peeled his face from Bruce’s neck to figure out what was happening. Alfred was smiling, and so was Bruce, and he _didn’t understand what was there to be smiling about._ It was a _tragedy!_ Did they not get that?

“Ah, but I’m not alone anymore, am I, Dickie?”

Dick frowned. Bruce pressed a quick kiss to his forehead.

“Because I have you now,” he clarified, “So I won’t be lonely again.”

Oh, Dick thought, _oh._

He laid his head back down on Bruce’s chest, listened to the steady beating of his lion-heart, and knew from that moment onwards that he could never truly leave this man. The quiet strains of a piano showtune reached them as Alfred vanished into the kitchen ahead of them. A heavenly smell wafted out the door as Bruce began to hum along to the radio, the sound rumbling deep in his chest against Dick’s ear.

 

_A mint julep, a mint julep._

_A mint julep, a mint julep._

 

_One mint julep was the cause of it all._


End file.
